"In private industry, if you screw things up, you get the boot; in the civil service, if you screw things up, I get the boot"

In the Washington Academic Internship Program, we talk a lot about how public policy is made, which usually leads to consideration of the tension, endemic to the nation's capital, between politicians and civil servants. Indeed, the Washington Buckeye is convinced that it is this tension--and not the more celebrated rivalry of Democrats with Republicans, or liberals with conservatives--that makes this city tick.

There is no better way of gaining insight into the contest between politicians and civil servants than through the 1980s BBC comedy series called Yes, Minister and its sequel, Yes, Prime Minister; they were Margaret Thatcher's favorite television shows. The main characters in the original series were Jim Hacker, a Member of Parliament of indeterminte party affiliation who serves as Minister of Administrative Affairs, and his Permanent Secretary (a senior career civil servant, in other words), Sir Humphrey Appleby. Wikipedia sums up their relationship as follows:

The different ideals and self-interested motives of the characters are frequently contrasted. Whilst Hacker occasionally approaches an issue from a sense of idealism and a desire to be seen to improve things, he ultimately sees his re-election and elevation to higher office as the only measures of his success. Accordingly, he must appear to the voters to be effective and responsive to the public will. To his party (and, in the first incarnation, the Prime Minister) he must act as a loyal and effective party member. Sir Humphrey, on the other hand, genuinely believes that it is the Civil Service that knows what is best for the country (a belief shared by his bureaucratic colleagues) which is usually what is best for the Civil Service. Most of Sir Humphrey's actions are motivated by his wish to maintain the prestige, power, and influence he enjoys inside a large, bureaucratic organisation and also to preserve the numerous perks of his position: automatic honours, a substantial income, a fixed retirement age, a large pension, and the practical impossibility of being made redundant or being sacked. In fact, a good deal of the tension in their relationship comes from Hacker's awareness that it is the politicians who are liable to lose their jobs if civil service ineptitude comes to public attention.

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books there is an article by Philippe Sands on the inquiry undertaken by a blue-ribbon commission chaired by a senior civil servant, Sir John Chilcot, on the origins of British involvement in the Iraq War. Although the inquiry has not yet been completed, it already has brought certain documents to light that point to the key role played by Prime Minister Tony Blair's Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, who firmly believed--right up until the last minute, when he was brow-beaten by advisors to President George W. Bush--that waging war in Iraq would be illegal without a clear mandate from the United Nations. In addition to the political pressures on cabinet ministers such as Lord Goldsmith, the documents reveal the civil service in all its glory, as if it were the reincarnation of Yes, Minister. Read it, weep.